About five years ago, Paddy Considine started to ask himself a question: why wasn’t he a very good actor? This enquiry led to a series of related concerns: why was he decent in some films, such as Dead Man’s Shoes, but so appalling in others? Why was he able to vividly portray an angry confrontation, but incapable, for example, of convincingly picking up a phone and calling a taxi?

These insecurities will be surprising to nearly everyone who has seen the 40-year-old Considine’s work. Dead Man’s Shoes, the eviscerating 2004 revenge drama that he co-wrote, may still be his calling card, but he long ago proved his versatility with comic performances in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, and, respectively, understated and then wildly overstated roles in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine and The Double. Prime-time renown has come from a recurring part as the title character in the ITV hit drama The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Meanwhile, as a writer-director, Considine has made one short film, Dog Altogether, and one feature, Tyrannosaur – and both won Baftas.

It’s not easy to name a British actor of his age so widely admired and respected. Considine, his hair gelled into a rockabilly cliff, shakes his head: “I don’t know why people like me,” he says. “But I knew there was some kind of jam, and I wanted to know why. So I went to an acting coach and even he was like, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘I can’t act. I want to learn how to act.’”

“I was terrible in some films,” he continues. “And I mean terrible. I’m a lucky guy because people haven’t seen the rubbish I’ve done. They just come up and say the three good things that I’ve done or whatever.”

Considine grins as he explains the hole he found himself in. He laughs a lot, actually, during the hour we spend together, in contrast to his rather forbidding reputation. He has often been defined by his screen persona: his unsettlingly convincing depiction of unhinged characters; his famed refusal to audition for any director because it was, he once said, “disrespectful and impersonal”. But Considine accepts that he hasn’t helped himself with some dyspeptic interviews he has given. Today, he specifically requested a journalist who had never met him before and he hoped that the encounter would be “more upbeat” than has often been the case.

There were extenuating factors, too, for his malaise. In 2011, Considine was told he had Asperger’s, a diagnosis that made a lot of sense to him. He had felt hypersensitive for a while, often convinced that his wife and three children were somehow in danger. He’d wake up in the morning and want to go straight back to sleep or hide under a table when there was a knock on his front door. Then, last year, a specialist told him that he may in fact have Irlen Syndrome, a difficulty processing light that also has links with autism. Part of the treatment for Irlen is to wear tinted glasses or contact lenses, which Considine recalibrates every 10 months. Where before he struggled to maintain eye contact, now he finds himself considerably more at ease in social situations and on set.

“At times I didn’t want to do it,” admits Considine. “In interviews from four or five years ago, I looked like a guy who wanted to see the exit with regards to acting. It was something I had to learn to love and appreciate because it was giving me so much. It’s very easy to run and hide, but there’s some part of me that won’t do that. Part of me said, ‘I’m not going to drown here. I’m going to swim.’ And that’s how it’s been. I don’t really know how to drown.”

One reason Considine was so keen to engage an acting coach was that he had skipped any formal training. He was cast in his first role in 1999, A Room for Romeo Brass, by Shane Meadows, whom he met on a national diploma for performing arts at Burton College. Meadows went on to direct Considine in Dead Man’s Shoes, and the actor considers those early performances as little more than improvisations. His difficulties came when the size of the productions and the expectations increased.

“Some friends of mine said: ‘What do you need acting lessons for? It’s going to take something away from you.’ That’s fine; it’s not going to turn me into a theatrical, over-the-top actor. But I just want to know why some actors are all right answering the telephone and I’m not.”

He laughs. “Acting’s a free-for-all, anyone can have a go. You just walk in the door at any time and the next thing you are at the Bifas. It’s weird – I wouldn’t ask a guy to build me a boat who doesn’t know their craft and then take my kids out on it.”

Considine still lives in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, not far from where he grew up on a council estate in the suburb of Winshill. His father was Irish and often out of work; he was smart, Considine says, but struggled to articulate himself and often wound up in fights. Irlen Syndrome is hereditary and Considine wonders if that might explain his father’s volatility. On the positive side, when Considine signed up for a school production of Grease, none of his friends even smirked. “When you’re 13, only the squares did the plays,” he remembers. “It’s probably ’cos my dad had a reputation; he’d give them a duffing up.”

Even at that age, Considine knew he had to escape Winshill. “From a very, very young age,” he says, “it’s like, ‘I’m getting out of here. The day will come, because this ain’t going to be my life.’ I watched Rocky and I was obsessed: ‘I’m doing what he did. I’m getting out of the hood!’ This wasn’t a disrespectful thing, but I had aspirations and all of the families of the kids I ran with, they were all broken. The hours were disappearing in front of us: we were only kids but the potential was there to just piss our lives away.”

Initially, Considine was drawn to music. A noise-rock band, the Telescopes, signed to Creation Records, rehearsed on the estate, and he sat outside the house for hours listening to the dull thud of their practice. Aged 18, Considine started his own band with Shane Meadows called She Talks to Angels: he played drums and Nick Hemming, now in the Leisure Society, was guitarist. Considine left for Brighton University to study photography, under the social documentarian Paul Reas. At one point, Considine was threatened with expulsion, but he turned it around to record a first-class degree. Reas described one project, portraits of Considine’s parents in their house in Winshill, as “fucking brilliant”.

“I learned to be an artist in Brighton,” he says. “That’s where I finally understood these feelings and emotions going round my head. I’m one of the few people who is proud to say they are an artist. People are embarrassed of it, or it’s a naff thing to describe yourself as, but if I didn’t have acting, directing, music, then I’d struggle. If I didn’t have an outlet, I’d be in trouble.”

Success as an actor, when it came, was unexpected and impossible to control. Those early collaborations with Meadows led to a part opposite Russell Crowe in Cinderella Man, and a role as a Guardian reporter in the third of the Bourne films, The Bourne Ultimatum. A measure of stability was provided by remaining in Burton-on-Trent, albeit in a grander house with a garden, with his wife Shelley, who he’s been with since he was 18.

“When I started off acting, I was always portrayed as being angry and I wasn’t angry,” says Considine. “I was just ill, in a way. I wasn’t diagnosed with this [Irlen Syndrome], I didn’t know what was going on. I was becoming more detached. But I always knew I wasn’t that dark guy they were talking about. I had the potential in me, of course, but I wasn’t educated about who I was and what I was feeling. Without being too bullshitty, you grow. I’m a 40-year-old man now.”

As a result of everything he’s been through, Considine is more confident about his acting than he’s ever been. And it shows: he returns this month with Pride, a dramatisation of the unlikely union between the gay community in London and a group of miners in Wales during the 1984 strike, and two new instalments of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. When Considine first appeared as Jack Whicher, a troubled detective in 19th-century London, it seemed an odd marriage: one review compared it to Liam Gallagher doing a cameo on Emmerdale. But he has given the character a complexity that makes it superior Sunday-night entertainment.

“You can listen to people out there who tell you: ‘This is a load of shit.’ Or: ‘What’s Paddy Considine doing in an ITV drama?’ But I can’t live my life by what a stranger might perceive of me. You know, Auntie Beryl likes them. It gets millions of viewers, but people don’t come up to me on the street and say, ‘Excuse me, I saw you in Mr Whicher last night.’ I get to walk between the raindrops still.”

On multiple fronts, Considine appears to be making up for lost time; he typically wakes at 6am to fit it all in. His band, Riding the Low, has just recorded its second album and can be seen at some late-season festivals, including Festival No 6 at Portmeirion. He is planning to direct again, too: his adaptation of Jon Hotten’s TheYears of the Locust, the true story of a naïve boxer and his manipulative promoter, is set to go into production next year. He is also talking about his acting with an unprecedented enthusiasm. He even cheerfully puts himself forward for auditions these days.

“I’m doing this for life,” says Considine. “If I switch off now and think, ‘Well, Dead Man’s Shoes is the best thing I’ve ever done,’ then I may as well retire. But I might do my best stuff when I’m 50; I have no idea. I look at my friend Bill Nighy, he’s doing his thing. It doesn’t have to end tomorrow; it’s not based on my looks and my box-office appeal. So I guess I’m a lucky sod.”

Two new episodes of the Suspicions of Mr Whicher air on ITV1 in September; Pride is out on 12 September

• This article was amended on 11 September 2014 to clarify that Winshill is a suburb of Burton-on-Trent.